FROM THE MAGAZINE

Is the Competitive Bridge World Rife with Cheaters?

For years, allegations and innuendo swirled around the high-stakes world of tournament bridge, but no one dared to speak out. Last summer, a Norwegian player broke the code of silence. Then came the bigger challenge: proving it.

RAW DEAL
A reimagining of the hand that brought down the cheating Hugo Drax in Ian Fleming’s Moonraker.

Photograph by David Prince.

On August 22, 2015, seven days after his loss at the Spingold, an annual week-long bridge championship held last year at the Chicago Hilton, Boye Brogeland posted a teasing comment to the Web site Bridgewinners.com. “Very soon there will come out mind boggling stuff that would even make a Hollywood movie surreal,” wrote Brogeland, a 43-year-old Norwegian bridge player who is ranked 77th in the world. “It will give us a tremendous momentum to clean the game up, from the bottom to the very top.” He followed this, two days later, with another comment advising players what to do if they have cheaters on their team, and announced that he and his teammates Richie Schwartz, Allan Graves, and Espen Lindqvist were relinquishing all the titles they had won in the previous two years. He made no mention of the pair with whom the six-man team had won those titles, Lotan Fisher and Ron Schwartz (no relation to Richie)—a deliberate omission, Brogeland says, to spare Bridge Winners any potential legal liability.

But two days later, Brogeland launched his own Web site, Bridgecheaters.com. The welcome page featured a huge photo of Fisher and Schwartz, a young Israeli duo who, since breaking into the international ranks in 2011, while still in their early 20s, had stunned the bridge world by snapping up the game’s top trophies. Grinning, arms around each other’s shoulders, they appeared under the tagline THE GREATEST SCAM IN THE HISTORY OF BRIDGE! Brogeland described an altercation he’d had with Fisher at the Spingold over a phantom trick (Fisher claimed 11 tricks in one hand when, in fact, he’d held the cards for 10), and posted examples of what he claimed to be suspiciously illogical hands played by the pair. He also included a “Cheating History”—information he had dug up from the Israel Bridge Federation and had translated from the original Hebrew. Brogeland said it laid out a pattern of alleged cheating and bad sportsmanship going back to when Fisher and Schwartz were in their mid-teens: in 2003, Fisher was suspended for a year for forging results and for unsportsmanlike conduct in the final of the Israeli championships; at the 2004 Tel Aviv International Bridge Festival, he was suspended for a month for calling another player a “faggot”; in July 2004, he and Schwartz were investigated for suspicious hands after winning the three-day Shaufel Cup; a year later, Schwartz was suspended for forging match results.

The site, in its first 24 hours, received more than 100,000 hits. For the game of contract bridge, the technical name for a 91-year-old pastime that also happens to be a multi-million-dollar business, it was an earthquake equal to the jolt that shook international cycling when Lance Armstrong was banned from competition for doping. Before going public with his accusations, Brogeland, aware that he was taking on powerful interests (at the professional level, the game runs on the sponsorships of C.E.O.’s and multi-millionaires), consulted the Norwegian police, who, Brogeland says, advised, “When you blow the whistle, do not be at your home address.” Fisher and Schwartz, denying all wrongdoing, hired lawyers, who dispatched a letter to Brogeland threatening a lawsuit and offering to settle if he paid them $1 million. Last fall Brogeland received a text that had originated with a teammate of Fulvio Fantoni and Claudio Nunes, the Italian pair who, for more than a decade, have reigned as the game’s No. 1 and No. 2 players. Brogeland had also publicly accused them, along with two other top-ranking bridge pairs, of cheating. The message read, “Tell your friend Boye that whenever he needs a wheelchair we have plenty of those in the south.” Fisher posted to his Facebook page a comment that Brogeland took as a message directed at him: “Jealousy made you sick. Get ready for a meeting with the devil.” (Fisher denies that this message was intended for Brogeland.)

When I asked Jeff Meckstroth, widely recognized as one of the best bridge players in the world, about Brogeland, he answered me bluntly. “The guy has the biggest balls of anyone I’ve ever known.”

Brogeland is a boyish, athletically built man whose blond hair, blue eyes, and easygoing smile mask a ferocious competitiveness. The son of a butcher father and teacher mother, he was born and raised in the tiny, isolated town of Moi (population 1,977), in southern Norway. Today he lives in Flekkefjord, a short drive from where he grew up, in a house he shares with his wife, Tonje, and their two young children. “I come from a place where everybody knows everybody,” he says. “Integrity is part of what makes you in such a community.” Early tragedy also had a decisive effect on his character, he says. He was 11 years old when his mother committed suicide. “When those things happen, I think it makes you think a lot about big questions in life,” he says, “fairness and justice.”

Having learned bridge at age eight from his grandparents, he fell in love with the game, and turned pro at 28. He has won several international tournaments, runs a successful Norwegian bridge magazine, and in 2013 was recruited by his current sponsor, Richie Schwartz, a Bronx-born bridge addict, mathematician, and program analyst, who made a fortune at the racetrack in the 1970s. When choosing bridge players for his teams, Schwartz often hires undervalued European players who cost less than Americans. “I always fought to get the best deals,” says Schwartz—who nevertheless admits that he will pay up to $200,000 to play in three annual U.S. nationals with a given pair. “Some pay $500,000 or more, though,” he adds. Brogeland says Schwartz pays him travel expenses and a base yearly salary of $50,000—with big bonuses for strong showings in tournaments.

“IT’S AN UNWRITTEN RULE THAT YOU NOT PUBLICLY ACCUSE ANYONE— EVEN IF YOU’RE SURE.”

Not long after Brogeland joined Schwartz’s team, he learned that Schwartz was hiring Lotan Fisher and Ron Schwartz. Brogeland had heard the rumors: in 2012, Fisher and Schwartz won the Cavendish, one of bridge’s most coveted titles, but under circumstances suspicious enough that other top players refused to play in the tournament the following year if Fisher and Schwartz played. (They did not.) But because Brogeland had never played against them and did not know them personally, he reserved judgment. “I try to base my opinion of people on what I experience myself,” he says, adding that he did, however, warn his new teammates. “I told them, ‘I’ve heard the rumors. Whatever you do, play straight.’ ”

Over the next two years, the team of Brogeland, Lindqvist, Fisher, Schwartz, Graves, and Schwartz won a string of championships: the 2014 Spingold, the 2014 Reisinger, the 2015 Jacoby Swiss. During that time, says Brogeland, he regularly checked Bridge Base Online, a Web site that archives tournament hands, so he could monitor how his new teammates were behaving when playing at the table adjacent to him. He saw “maybe five or six” suspicious-looking hands, he says, “but nowhere near enough to say, ‘You’re cheating.’ ” Nevertheless, he says he was relieved when, in the summer of 2015, the pair was lured away by the deep-pocketed sponsor Jimmy Cayne, former C.E.O. of the defunct investment house Bear Stearns. “When they changed teams,” Brogeland says, “I didn’t have to be faced with this kind of environment where you’re not sure—you feel something is strange but you can’t really tell.”

Fisher, meanwhile, was enjoying his position at the top of the game, where the lives of many successful young pros more closely resemble those of well-heeled, globe-hopping rock musicians than what might be conjured by the term “bridge player.” Convening nightly at a hotel bar in whatever city is holding the competition—Biarritz, Chennai, Chicago—they drink until the small hours, rising late the next day, since tournament organizers mercifully schedule the first matches for one in the afternoon. Fisher, hailed as the “wonder boy of Israeli bridge,” was a fixture of the bar scene. Charismatic, and darkly handsome, with a widow’s peak and heavy brows, he posted Instagram photos of himself posing in well-cut suits in five-star hotels, behind the wheel of luxury cars, or partying with an array of young people—spoils of his status in a game where, for three years, he had been drawing an almost unbroken string of wins that brought bonuses amounting to six figures. There was only one problem: the persistent rumors that he was a cheater. Many people were whispering about it, according to Steve Weinstein, a top American player who writes for the Web site Bridgewinners.com. “But it’s an unwritten rule that you not publicly accuse anyone—even if you’re sure,” Weinstein says. It was a Catch-22 that Fisher seemed to delight in flaunting, shrugging off questions about his suspicious play as if daring anyone to openly accuse him. “He had the Nietzschean superman personality,” says Fred Gitelman, a former champion and co-founder of Bridge Base Online. “He just thought he was in a different league.”

Boye Brogeland

By Christian Arp-Hansen/ARP Photo APS.

Champs and Cheats

Contract bridge is built on the rules of the 18th-century British game whist: a deck of cards is dealt to four people, who play in two-person partnerships, sitting opposite each other at a table. The player to the left of the dealer leads with a card of any suit—heart, diamond, club, or spade—and each player in succession plays a card of the suit led; the highest card wins the trick. It’s a deceptively simple game only slightly complicated by the existence of the trump: a card in a suit that overrules all others. In whist, trump is determined randomly, before the start of each hand. In auction bridge, a game popularized in England in 1904, trump is determined in each hand’s opening “auction,” when the teams, communicating solely by way of spoken bids (“Three spades,” “Two hearts,” “Three no trump”), establish which (if any) suit will be trump and how many tricks they think they can take. Pairs who take more tricks than contracted for are awarded extra points for those tricks. The pair with the most points, after all 13 tricks are played, wins the hand.

Contract bridge emerged from devilish refinements introduced, in 1925, by the American railroad magnate Harold S. Vanderbilt. While on a cruise through the Panama Canal, he sought to goose up a game of dull auction bridge by awarding escalating bonus points to pairs who took the greatest risk in the opening auction, and imposed steep point deductions on pairs who failed to make the tricks contracted for. Thus did a polite and mannerly British parlor game take on some of the brash, hypercompetitive, sweaty-palmed excitement of the big-money trading Vanderbilt was familiar with from Wall Street.

The game became a craze during the Great Depression, when an evening’s entertainment for two couples could be had for the price of a deck of cards. How-to manuals, written by actual bridge celebrities, like the publicity genius and Romanian immigrant Ely Culbertson, sat atop best-seller lists; bridge hands were analyzed on the radio; millions of bridge fans nationwide followed the 1931 murder trial of Kansas City housewife Myrtle Bennett, who gunned down her husband after a spat in which she called him “a bum bridge player.” (She was acquitted.) After the Second World War, bridge took on a new sheen of glamour and exclusivity, joining baccarat and casino poker in the array of upper-class pastimes enjoyed by that emblem of postwar suavity, James Bond. In the 1955 novel Moonraker, Bond (in one of the most thrilling scenes Ian Fleming ever wrote) faces off, at M’s club, in a game of high-stakes bridge against arch-villain Sir Hugo Drax, whom Bond coolly unmasks as a cheater. (“And don’t forget that cheating at cards can still smash a man,” M tells Bond.)

In the 1960s, international tournament bridge took on some of the swashbuckling heroics associated with downhill skiing and Grand Prix racing, with legends like the powerhouse Italian “Blue Team” winning 16 world titles between 1957 and 1975 and heartthrob Egyptian actor Omar Sharif (a professional player who ranked in the game’s top 50) telling an interviewer, “The real question is why I spend so much time making movies when I could be playing bridge.” Meanwhile, the game, which draws on innate gifts of logic, problem solving, planning, and risk assessment, became particularly popular among Wall Street traders (who rely on those skills professionally) and, to this day, counts as its most devoted fans many highly successful C.E.O.’s and entrepreneurs, including Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

In the popular imagination, however, bridge has all but vanished. Last year, The New York Times dropped its long-running bridge column, and today the American Contract Bridge League (A.C.B.L.), the game’s governing body in North America, lists only 168,000 members, with a median age, despite the hotel-bar set, of 71. Yet the professional, tournament game has only increased as a serious, moneymaking pursuit, with rich bridge addicts assembling stables of top players, paying them ever rising retainers and bonuses—all for the privilege of playing hands with the pros in important tournaments. (The first American “dream team,” the Dallas Aces, was put together in 1968 by businessman Ira Corn to challenge Italy’s Blue Team.) “It’s like paying to play a few games of doubles at Wimbledon with Federer or Djokovic,” says Christopher Rivera, a game director at Manhattan’s Honors Bridge Club.

RON SCHWARTZ, accused cheater; right, LOTAN FISHER, accused cheater.

By Boye Brogeland.

Except that the top sponsors today also happen to be very strong players. Cayne, now 82, was a bridge professional before joining Bear Stearns in 1969. His obsession with the game has even been cited as a contributing cause of Bear Stearns’s demise. As the firm spiraled in 2007 during the subprime-mortgage crisis, C.E.O. Cayne was reportedly at bridge tournaments, distracted and unreachable. Pierre Zimmermann, a Monaco-based real-estate multi-millionaire who sponsored the Monaco team on which Fantoni and Nunes played, took up bridge in his 30s and is one of the game’s strongest players. Both men reportedly pay up to half a million dollars annually to individual members of their five-man teams—when they win. Gail Greenberg, one of the game’s greatest women champions, says that such paydays have fueled cheating by players hoping to be recruited by deep-pocketed sponsors, or to hang on to the one they’ve got. Chris Willenken, a leading American professional, says, “There is definitely enough money involved that it’s easy to understand why not everybody might be honest.”

And then there’s the sheer ease of cheating. Pairs are forbidden to say what high cards they hold or in what suit they might be strong—except by way of the koan-like bids (“Two no trump”) they make in a hand’s opening auction. Any other communication is outlawed by Rule 73.b.2 of the A.C.B.L.’s Laws of Duplicate Bridge: “The gravest possible offence is for a partnership to exchange information through prearranged methods....” In one of the game’s biggest scandals, British champion J. Terence Reese and his partner Boris Schapiro, at the 1965 Bermuda Bowl, in Buenos Aires, were discovered using finger signals—clutching their cards variously with two, three, or four fingers, with an array of odd spacings between the digits—to communicate the number of hearts they held. The scandal exploded in newspapers around the world.

Tournament organizers would eventually respond by erecting screens to block partners’ view of each other. “It limits the channels of communication under some circumstances,” says Bob Hamman, an original member of the Dallas Aces. “But no method of this nature is an adequate defense against a determined adversary.” When players were discovered communicating via footsie (two members of the Italian Blue Team were among those accused of engaging in this type of cheating at the 1975 Bermuda Bowl), barriers were installed under tables. In 2013, the “coughing doctors”—German physicians Michael Elinescu and Entscho Wladow—were caught using coded throat clearings at the D’Orsi World Senior Bowl, in Bali, and banned from playing bridge together for life. (They denied the charges, with Wladow blaming the coughing on his asthma.) Pairs can come under suspicion even when no signaling is detected—simply through illogical play. “In bridge at the highest level,” says Willenken, “the best players play in a relentlessly logical fashion, so when something illogical happens, other good players notice it. And if that illogical thing is consistently winning, suspicions can be aroused.” Even variations in the speed of play, which to professionals has a particular pace and rhythm, can raise alarms.

Getting the game’s governing bodies to act quickly on charges of cheating is another matter. Given the potential for lawsuits, the organizing bodies necessarily have to work carefully to collect evidence, which can take time. Jeff Meckstroth was in the finals of the 2014 Vanderbilt—an annual seven-day tournament—in Dallas against Fantoni and Nunes when he says he believed his opponents were placing their discarded tricks on the table in a suspicious manner. Meckstroth was convinced they were signaling. “They turned the trick the wrong way to say, ‘I don’t have anything in dummy’s weak suit,’ ” he says. He reported Fantoni and Nunes to the A.C.B.L.—then badgered the organization for more than a year to do something. “They just put their head in the sand,” he says. (The A.C.B.L. says that, in fact, it did begin monitoring the pair.) Fantoni and Nunes continued to compete—even after an incident at the 2015 Italian championships, when Nunes played an ace-of-diamonds lead so wildly illogical (yet successful) that his only defense, when questioned by the Federation of Italian Bridge, was to claim that he “had a mental blackout” in midplay. Even this opera buffa moment was not enough to get them banned from the game. (An investigation by the Italian federation led to an acquittal when the two judges hearing the case couldn’t agree.)

By the summer of 2015, the grumbling about cheaters had reached critical mass. “Last June, I was at the European championships, in Norway,” Meckstroth says. “I was with a group of top players and they were all complaining: ‘What are we going to do? These guys are cheating.’ I threw up my hands and said, ‘I’ve been trying for 18 months and met with nothing but frustration.’ ”

That all changed three months later, when Brogeland—defying the game’s governing bodies, ignoring the unwritten rule that players never accuse one another, and risking his own expulsion if unable to prove the charges—went public. “It’s a perfect example of civil disobedience,” says Willenken. “There’s this wall of silence because of the rules about accusing other people. And everybody is seeing that the system—that whole paradigm—is breaking down. It’s not allowing for an honest game. Boye comes along and says, ‘I don’t care what the rules are. I don’t care what they do to me. I’m going to come out and say all this stuff.’ ”

“I did this because I love the game,” Brogeland says. “I asked, ‘What would my parents do? My grandparents?’ It was clear. I just wanted to focus on what was right.”

Team sponsors, such as Cayne, a former C.E.O. of Bear Stearns, pay out six-figure salaries. Left, **JIMMY CAYNE, **
team sponsor; right, ALFREDO VERSACE, bridge champion.

Courtesy of The American Contract Bridge League.

Less than a month after Cayne had lured Fisher and Schwartz away from Richie Schwartz’s team, Brogeland met the pair again—this time as opponents, in the quarter-final of the 2015 Spingold, at the Hilton hotel in Chicago. It was a match that would change bridge forever.

Brogeland’s team was the clear underdog. Team captain Richie Schwartz and his partner, Allan Graves (a septuagenarian with a friendly, philosophical temperament), faced off against the suspect pair at one table, while Brogeland and his regular partner, fellow Norwegian Espen Lindqvist (a soft-spoken 28-year-old with spiky blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses), played Cayne and Alfredo Versace at a neighboring table. In a more than eight-hour battle, Brogeland’s team won, in an upset, by the slimmest margin possible: a single point.

Or seemed to. Fisher immediately contested the result on a technicality. After a nearly two-hour arbitration that stretched until 1:30 A.M., the win was overturned: Brogeland’s team had now lost by one point and been knocked out of the tournament—a crushing defeat compounded by Brogeland’s seeing Lotan Fisher run from the committee room punching the air and screaming in triumph.

“If we had won that match,” Brogeland admits, “I would have gone to bed and tried to get as much sleep as I could, to try to win the semi-final the next day. I might have said, ‘Maybe they cheat, but I don’t want to put my life and career on the line … ’ ”

But as things stood, Brogeland could not sleep. After tossing and turning all night, he rose at seven A.M., went to his laptop, and opened Bridge Base Online. “I checked the B.B.O. files to see how we lost,” Brogeland says. He claims he immediately noticed something odd at the neighboring table. Ron Schwartz had opened a hand by playing a club lead. Yet, as Brogeland now believed, Schwartz’s hand indicated that a heart lead was the obvious play. “I wondered, How could he not lead a heart?” Brogeland says. “All top players that I know would have led that suit. But he didn’t. If it was wrong for him not to do it, then O.K. But of course it was right for him not to lead it. I think, Wow, this is strange.”

In one of the final hands, Fisher had claimed 11 tricks—giving his team the winning edge. Except Fisher, as B.B.O. showed, held the cards for just 10 tricks. “I say, Fuck, what is this?” Brogeland recalls. Dumbfounded, he gathered with his teammates and asked what had happened on that hand. Graves recounted to Brogeland how Fisher, claiming to have made all 11 tricks he’d contracted for, had briskly stuffed his cards into the slotted board at the center of the table where cards are returned after a hand. Bridge players usually go by an honor system when a player says he has made all of his tricks. But Graves made a point of asking to see Fisher’s cards. Fisher yanked them from the board, showed them to his opponents, then shoved them back into the slot. Eleven tricks were duly entered on the scorecard. Brogeland now wondered if Fisher had pulled the oldest scam in bridge: hiding a losing card behind the others. In any event, the miscount could not be corrected: challenges must be raised within a half-hour of a match. The loss would stand.

Brogeland went in search of Fisher. He found him by the hotel elevators. Brogeland says Fisher admitted to miscounting the hand, but claimed it was unintentional. “I made a mistake,” he said. “It happens.”

“No, Lotan,” said Brogeland. “You never make these kinds of mistakes.”

Fisher went on the attack. “Do you call me a cheater?”

“No,” Brogeland said. “But this does not look good.”

OMAR SHARIF
Actor.

From Mondadori Portfolio/Getty Images.

A Grand Coup

Brogeland spent the next two days at the tournament scouring B.B.O. and comparing notes with other players. By the time he flew back to Norway (after watching Fisher and Schwartz win the Spingold in a final that carried moments that seemed suspicious to Brogeland and those he was watching with), he was convinced the pair were cheating. And he was determined to expose them.

He knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Although he felt certain that they were signaling to each other, Brogeland had no idea how. Still, he believed that if he amassed enough illogical hands, he could make a convincing case—however circumstantial—to present to the game’s governing bodies.

For the next week, he hunkered over his computer in Flekkefjord, working all day collecting suspicious hands on B.B.O. and sleeping only three hours a night. “I was going on pure adrenaline,” he says. He phoned trusted players around the world—Ishmael Del’Monte in Australia, Per-Ola Cullin in Sweden, Brad Moss in the United States—to canvass for other suspect hands. Thomas Bessis, a French champion who had played as a junior with Fisher, had been keeping a folder of suspicious hands on the pair for years.

Brogeland contacted governing bodies on both sides of the Atlantic, including the European Bridge League and the A.C.B.L. An official at the E.B.L. told Brogeland to submit an official complaint, in writing, so that the organization could consider whether to initiate a formal investigation. “He said, ‘No, this is going to take too long a time,’ ” recalls the E.B.L. official to whom Brogeland spoke. Brogeland also pressed the A.C.B.L. for immediate action. When he gave suspect hands to A.C.B.L. officials, he was told to supply more hands. Brogeland grew frustrated. “They had plenty of hands,” he says. “Fifty, 60 hands. I said, ‘How many do you need? One hundred? Two hundred? Please, do something!’ ”

A.C.B.L. C.E.O. Robert Hartman—a tall, dark-haired man who had previously worked as general manager of a Thoroughbred racetrack in the Bay Area—declines to discuss specifics of ongoing investigations, but admits that the process for reviewing cheating is lengthy, and is frustrating for players who can feel, he says, as if their complaints “have gone into space.” The process ordinarily begins when a player, directly after a match, files a memo detailing specific claims against an opponent. “The memo is sent to A.C.B.L. headquarters, in Horn Lake, Mississippi, where it is submitted to a five-step process of review and appeals,” says Hartman. The process can take a year or longer to play out.

Brogeland had no intention of waiting that long. He wanted the pair out of the game before the upcoming Bermuda Bowl—a month away. He would have to bypass official channels and go public. He weighed the risks to his career and reputation—which included possible charges of unseemly self-interest in pursuing a pair whom he played alongside, for two years, and accused only after an infuriating loss at the Spingold. He dismissed the worry. “Does anyone really think I would risk my career and livelihood because of a single match?” he says. “I publish a bridge magazine, I play professional bridge—this is what I do. This is my life. If I was wrong here, I would just have been more or less out of bridge.”

And so, on August 24, he dropped his hint about Fisher and Schwartz on Bridge Winners, then went live two days later with Bridge Cheaters, where he pulled no punches, calling Fisher a “Con Man” and laying out his evidence.

Incriminating as Brogeland’s claims might have seemed to non-experts, experienced cheating investigators were underwhelmed. Kit Woolsey—an owlish 72-year-old with a master’s in mathematics—is a top American bridge and backgammon professional, and the investigator who had conducted, for the A.C.B.L., the statistical analysis that implicated the “coughing doctors.” On Bridge Winners, Woolsey voiced doubts about Brogeland’s evidence. “His example hands are certainly interesting, and an indication of possible wrongdoing,” Woolsey wrote. “But I do not believe that by themselves they are any kind of proof of anything, or even any real reason to believe that there were signals being given.” Woolsey, a statistician, thought the sample size wasn’t complete and thus skewed the evidence against the pair. Barry Goren, a U.S. professional (and no relation to the revered Charles Goren, who, in the 1950s, inherited Ely Culbertson’s title of “Mr. Bridge”), slammed Brogeland for conducting a “mad crusade” against Fisher and Schwartz over the Spingold loss and excoriated him for publicly accusing the pair without due process. “Personally,” Goren wrote on Bridge Winners, “I think Boye should be thrown out of Bridge for the way this was handled.”

As if in tacit acknowledgment of how his failure to uncover actual signaling by Fisher and Schwartz weakened his case, Brogeland had included links to three YouTube videos of the pair in match play. (The videotaping of full bridge tournaments and their posting online had occurred for the first time only a year earlier, at the 2014 European championship, in Croatia.) Brogeland and his wife had spent hours squinting at the videos, scrutinizing Fisher and Schwartz’s every twitch and cough, but had been unable to detect any definitive signaling. Brogeland resorted to asking viewers, in a caption to one of the videos, “What do you think was Fisher’s reason to lead a heart?” Seventy-two hours after the site went up, no one had any good theories.

Then, on August 30, Brogeland’s friend and fellow bridge professional Per-Ola Cullin, at home in Stockholm, watched one of the posted videos—the one with Fisher’s suspicious heart lead. Cullin noticed that at the start of the hand Schwartz—a plodding player with a round, prematurely balding head pasted with tendrils of sweaty-looking hair who seemed, to many, the perfect patsy co-conspirator—placed on the table the small slotted board that holds the cards. This was normal. But he didn’t place the board in the center of the table, its usual position. Instead he slid it a few inches to the right, to one side of the opening in the trapdoor of the anti-cheating screen. “It really struck me as weird,” Cullin says. He decided to watch the previous hand. The board had been placed in the same peculiar spot—but this time by Fisher. As with the succeeding hand, the team led hearts. “My adrenaline started pumping,” Cullin says. “I started watching all the matches from the European championships.”

After several hours, Cullin was convinced he had cracked the code. The board’s placement seemed to signal what suit the partner should lead with: if put in the center, play a diamond; if pushed through the trapdoor to the partner’s side of the table, a spade; if to one side of the trapdoor, a heart; if to the other, a club. Cullin tested the hypothesis on his girlfriend, who doesn’t play cards. According to him, she was able to guess the pair’s actions every time. “It was ridiculous,” says Cullin, a former criminal judge. “I’ve sent people to jail on much less convincing evidence.”

At a little after three in the morning, he texted Brogeland: “Boye. I broke the lead signal code. 100%. Do you allready [sic] know it?” An hour later, Brogeland texted back: “Awake?” The two men got on the phone. The next day, Brogeland forwarded the information to analyst Kit Woolsey.

Three days later, Woolsey posted to Bridge Winners an essay, “The Videos Speak,” confirming Cullin’s hypothesis and urging readers to continue scouring videos of the pair pending an official investigation by the game’s governing bodies. “We must build an air-tight case here,” Woolsey wrote, and added, “Boye has gotten the ball rolling, and it is our job to complete his work.” Shortly after that, Jimmy Cayne released a statement saying (“with heavy heart”) that Fisher and Schwartz were off his team, unless ultimately cleared of all charges, and he offered to forfeit the 2015 Spingold trophy that he had won with the pair. Fisher and Schwartz were suspended by the Israel Bridge Federation and the A.C.B.L. and placed under investigation by those bodies and the E.B.L.

It was an extraordinary exoneration for Brogeland. But he wasn’t done yet.

Maaijke Mevius, a 44-year-old mother of two living in Groningen, in the Netherlands, is a physicist specializing in astronomy, and an avid recreational bridge player. Galvanized by news of the allegations against Fisher and Schwartz, she idly wondered if she could spot any illegal signaling in YouTube videos of top players. She recalled an item she’d seen on the Web site NewInBridge about the game’s reigning pair, Fantoni and Nunes—the bizarre incident in which Nunes claimed to have had his “mental blackout” when playing a highly suspicious lead. “I thought, O.K., this is possibly an interesting pair to look at,” Mevius says.

Searching for illegal signaling in bridge videos is difficult even for top professional players, but Mevius, although an amateur player, was nevertheless well suited to the task. “From my work as a scientific investigator I know how to distinguish very well between noise and signal,” she says. Five minutes into watching her first video, she saw something. “I said, Hey, these guys are placing the cards in a non-natural way.” When laying their lead card face up on the table, they sometimes placed it vertically, sometimes horizontally. Did it mean something? Mevius spent the next eight hours watching videos of the pair, hand after hand. She took careful notes. She was convinced that Fantoni and Nunes were using the way they placed the card to signal to their partner whether they held any high honor-cards (ace, king, or queen). Placed vertically, they had at least one high honor; horizontally, they didn’t. Mevius e-mailed the information to Brogeland, whom she had never met. “I think this may be a code,” she wrote. Brogeland forwarded the e-mail to his friend Del’Monte, an expert cheating analyst and a top bridge teacher who has given lessons to Bill Gates. Del’Monte quickly agreed with Mevius’s suspicions.

Brogeland says that he had never suspected Fantoni and Nunes. Furthermore, he considered them friends. He liked Nunes’s shy, self-effacing manner, but was particularly close to Fantoni, a bear of a man with a friendly disposition—indeed, to some, too friendly. Meckstroth, acerbic and blunt-spoken, says he detected in Fantoni a calculated friendliness. “He was obsequious away from the table,” Meckstroth says. “I mean, nobody is this nice, going out of his way to show people pictures on his iPad. ‘Fantoni the Phony,’ I always called him.’ But Brogeland found him genuinely warm; he and his wife, Tonje, had visited with Fantoni and his wife, Iolanda, in Rome. Fantoni and Nunes once secured a spot for Brogeland on a team sponsored by the Italian businessman Francesco Angelini. “These were good friends,” Brogeland says, “people I went to dinner with, I respected, I traveled with. But to me, you don’t cross that line.”

Brogeland wanted to expose the pair without delay, but Brad Moss, the American player who had helped gather evidence against Fisher and Schwartz, urged caution. “Their sponsor is Pierre Zimmermann,” Moss says, “the most powerful person in bridge. There have been several examples in the past where the rules were—let’s just say—interpreted favorably for Mr. Zimmermann. He’s not a person you took on lightly.” (Zimmermann, in an e-mail, claims the opposite: “I tend to lose bridge appeals in surrealistic rulings.”) Moss and others warned Brogeland that if Zimmermann chose to litigate Brogeland could be ruined. “We begged him, ‘Why don’t we take some time, gather up as much evidence, build up a dossier, and then go after them?’ ” Moss says. “And Boye was like, ‘No. I don’t care. What can they do to me? If I live in a tent, I live in a tent. It’s now or never—look at the momentum.’ ”

Before publicly accusing the pair, Brogeland says, he phoned Fantoni and offered an ultimatum. They could confess, and thus hope to gain some sympathy from the governing bodies—who might let them back into the game in a few years—or Brogeland would out them. They had 24 hours to decide. “I said, ‘Fulvio, we have the evidence. Please go out and admit to something. Don’t do like Fisher and Schwartz and deny everything; this is just hopeless.’ ” Fantoni seemed to consider the offer. “He said, ‘I don’t like to fight,’ ” Brogeland recalls. But no announcement came.

On September 13, Bridge Winners published “The Videos Speak: Fantoni-Nunes.” Using the signaling code Mevius had suggested, Woolsey submitted for analysis some 85 hands played by Fantoni and Nunes. On all but three, Mevius’s code predicted the vertical or horizontal orientation of the opening lead—a statistical impossibility, Woolsey says, unless the players were colluding with a pre-arranged signal. “If you flip a coin 85 times, what are the chances it’s going to come up heads 82 times?” Woolsey says. “I mean, it’s one over you-don’t-want-to-know-how-many zeros.” The pair, who were suspended by the A.C.B.L. and placed under investigation by the body and the E.B.L., withdrew from competition. In a statement last November, the pair said, “We will not comment on allegations at this time, reserving our right to reply in a more appropriate setting.”

Disbelief greeted the news. On Bridge Winners, readers posted more than 1,100 comments (where 50 constitutes a robust reaction), the first of which said it all: “Is this the end? Speechless now … ”

It wasn’t quite the end. Brogeland soon received an anonymous e-mail tip from someone identifying himself as “No Matter.” The tipster advised taking a look at videos of Germany’s top-ranking pair, Alex Smirnov and Josef Piekarek, and Polish pair Cezary Balicki and Adam Zmudzinski. No Matter even pointed out what to look for: illegal signaling based on where the pair placed the special bidding cards in the bidding tray that is passed between the players during the auction part of each hand.

Astonishingly, when Brogeland checked the videos, he thought the tip seemed valid. Smirnov and Piekarek, told of Brogeland’s discovery, admitted to the violation in a statement: “We regret that in the past as a partnership we committed some ethical violations,” Smirnov wrote. “Josef and I have voluntarily agreed never again to play competitive bridge together and to take two years off…. We hope that after such a time has elapsed, that we might be welcomed back…. ” Balicki and Zmudzinski, who denied the charges, had their credentials for the Bermuda Bowl withdrawn by the World Bridge Federation, and the pair is now under investigation by the E.B.L.

Still more astonishing, however, was the person behind the mask of No Matter. It appeared to be the disgraced Lotan Fisher.

Jack to a King

Brogeland cannot explain why the man who had issued threats against him was now, anonymously, helping in the quest to root out cheaters—unless Fisher, by helping to expose others, hoped to take the focus off himself and his partner. Fisher, in an e-mail to me, claims that he only helped No Matter and that his motivation was the same as Brogeland’s—to clean up the game. “I love [bridge] more than Boye, Ish or anyone else,” he wrote, adding, “My next step is to prove that me and Ron Schwartz didn’t cheat. NEVER.” Fisher declined to say how he broke the other pairs’ cheating codes, but Brogeland says it’s no mystery. “It takes one to know one,” he says. (Having voluntarily withdrawn from play pending rulings by the European, American, and Israeli federations, Fisher and Schwartz last fall submitted a defense claiming that they did not engage in any collusive cheating.)

Rulings on the fate of all four pairs, by the game’s governing bodies, are expected this month. Generally, players believe that anyone found to have cheated will face lifetime bans. In the meantime, Brogeland’s actions have already had a permanent effect on the game. Last December, the A.C.B.L. held one of bridge’s biggest annual tournaments, the American nationals, at the Sheraton hotel in Denver, which drew 4,372 players from countries around the world. For the first time, the A.C.B.L. had installed small video cameras and microphones at the tables to record all quarter-final through final matches—since no one imagines that every dishonest pair has been rooted out. “I don’t know how deep this goes,” says A.C.B.L. president Hartman. “Four pairs have been suspended. But are there 20 more behind that? And 20 more behind that? Who really knows? So we’re doing everything we can to see if it does go deeper.” At the end of the tournament, Hartman convened the first meeting of a new anti-cheating task force made up of eight top players, who discussed means for streamlining the process of submitting complaints and investigating them. Fred Gitelman, of Bridge Base Online, unveiled a proposed anti-cheating device, an iPad-like tablet on which players manipulate virtual cards—an innovation that the game’s top players have so far resisted, since card feel is a critical part of their experience at the table. The adoption of such a device, however, seems inevitable in a game where the ease of cheating, and the financial inducements to do so, have dogged the professional game since its inception.

Players say that all of this has introduced a level of paranoia heretofore absent from tournament play. Steve Weinstein, of Bridge Winners, says that when he competed in the Bermuda Bowl last October, a month after the cheating scandal broke, he was unusually conscious of how he handled the cards. “I was noticing how I was leading,” he says. “Eventually I had to go: I don’t cheat! Stop thinking about this!” Cullin, whose sharp-eyed viewing of YouTube videos helped lead to the suspension of Fisher and Schwartz, says, “I actually went through my own videos at the Europeans to see how I played the cards. It was in all directions—and I was like, Oh, I hope there is no pattern here, because I’m going to be fucked!”

But for all the watchful unease that now hangs over the game, Brogeland has become its hero, named Bridge Personality of the Year last fall by the International Bridge Press Association. The fears of a reprisal from the game’s powerful sponsors proved unfounded. (Pierre Zimmermann says that he has no plans to sue Brogeland.) He’s been hailed, by Dallas Ace Bob Hamman, as the “sheriff” who cleaned up Dodge. Brogeland prefers to say that he ran a “Bridge Interpol,” since it reflects the collaborative, international effort critical to cleaning up the game.

In any case, Brogeland has become bridge’s reigning luminary. When he arrived for his first match at the Denver nationals, he had to fight his way through the crowd of hundreds of players and fans who had collected outside the tournament room. “Thank you for your service,” said a bearded man who had stopped Brogeland at the door of the game room.

“Well, I had to do it,” Brogeland said, shaking the man’s hand and trying to move off.

“You really put yourself on the line,” the man persisted.

Brogeland shrugged, smiled. “Bridge deserves it,” he said, and then headed for his table.